Viewing NuGet Packages with the NuGet Explorer

You may have seen that we released the the Windows Management Framework V5 Preview and that one of the new features is Windows PowerShell OneGet. OneGet is designed to dramatically simplify how you discover and install software packages.

Windows PowerShell OneGet

OneGet is a new way to discover and install software packages from around the web. With OneGet, you can:

· Manage a list of software repositories in which packages can be searched, acquired, and installed

· Search and filter your repositories to find the packages you need

· Seamlessly install and uninstall packages from one or more repositories with a single PowerShell command

This first version of OneGet installs and searches software from Chocolatey repositories. Support of additional repositories will come in subsequent versions.

What is Chocolatey?

Chocolatey NuGet is a Machine Package Manager, somewhat like apt-get, but built with Windows in mind.

What is Nuget?

NuGet is the package manager for the Microsoft development platform including .NET. The NuGet client tools provide the ability to produce and consume packages. The NuGet Gallery is the central package repository used by all package authors and consumers.

One of the things that comes getting up in discussions about using Chocolatey Packages with or without OneGet is the question how can I trust the Packages from a resource like Chocolatey? The Chocolatey Nuget Packages are build by the community so you need to be careful what you are downloading and installing like all other software from sources you don’t own yourself.

But what if there is a easy way to view the content of NuGet Package before installing the Chocolatey NuGet packages? And that is possible using the NuGet Package Explorer.

The NuGet package explorer tool which lets you view the metadata of a .nupkg package. After installing it, you can double click on .nupkg packages to open them in Package Explorer.

After installing the NuGet Package Explorer you can choose what to do.

Let’s open a package from the Online Chocolatey Feed.

Search the Package you are interested in to install. (like 7zip)

Click on open

Select the chocolateyInstall.ps1 file and right-click

Select View Content

You can now see all the metadata that’s within the Chocolatey NuGet Package of 7zip.

Do you now have enough info to decide if you want to install 7zip using Chocolatey or the new OneGet Module?